SUGAR TURNS TO COTTON: FRENCH RETELLINGS OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
Helen Camp Matthews
A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.
Chapel Hill 2012
ii © 2012
iii ABSTRACT
HELEN MATTHEWS: Sugar Turns to Cotton: French Retellings of the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War
(Under the direction of Dr. Dominique Fisher)
This dissertation argues that an outpouring of French literature based on the American Civil War (1861-1865), fought under the Second Empire of
Napoleon III, belongs to the same cultural legacy as the French textual response to the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), fought under the First Empire of
Napoleon. In my study, I demonstrate that the narrative and thematic currents of these two bodies of literature reveal parallel struggles of racial, social, and national repositioning, and that France’s popular interest in the American Civil War reflects a reconciliation with and confrontation of its own historical
investment in the institutions of colony and slavery. From the Haitian Revolution to the American Civil War, such works prioritize different visual means of
representation through the often hybrid genres of historical fiction, biography, and travel narrative.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the following people for their support and assistance: - My director, Dr. Dominique Fisher;
- My committee members, Dr. Martine Antle, Dr. Hassan Melehy, Dr. Philippe Barr, Dr. Ellen Welch, and Dr. Timothy Marr;
- My mentors, Robert Sapp, Emily Rose Cranford, Gene Hughes, Cale Lasalata, John Ríbo, Keith Schaefer, and Anne Steinberg;
- Tom Smither, Mary Jones, Celeste Yowell, and Sheena Melton; - My grandparents, Marion and Wense Grabarek;
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter
I. SUGAR TURNS TO COTTON………1
France and the Haitian Revolution………...8
France and the American Civil War………..……...…15
Publishing Under Two Empires………...………..20
Colonial Memory and History……….27
II. FICTION AND HISTORY………38
Beaumont’s America………...40
La Case de l’Oncle Tom……….49
Nos Américains………56
L’Incendie du Cap………65
III. BIOGRAPHIES OF LOUVERTURE AND LINCOLN………...75
The Duplicity of Louverture………83
The Honesty of Lincoln………...95
Lincoln in Biography………97
IV. EYEWITNESS TRAVEL NARRATIVES……..………...108
Laujon and Tocqueville………...111
American Races………...114
Oscar Comettant………...116
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CHAPTER 1 SUGAR TURNS TO COTTON
For — yes, let America know it, and ponder on it well — there is something more terrible than Cain slaying Abel: It is Washington slaying Spartacus!
Victor Hugo
On December 2, 1859, Victor Hugo sent an impassioned letter to the London press begging America for the release of abolitionist John Brown, who was to be hanged for murder and treason in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry was one of the first events in the many years of violence that would become the American Civil War, as the United States was ripped in half. Hugo wrote his letter from the Hauteville House on the island of Guernsey, where he had been living for years in exile after the coup of Napoleon III that turned the French Republic into the Second Empire. Along with his letter, Hugo included an original drawing, The Hanged Man, or John Brown, depicting a lone figure surrounded by darkness on the gallows, theatrically illuminated from the above. Below the figure, Hugo penned four clear white letters: ECCE,
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France, and particularly French Republicans like Hugo, had much at stake in the experiment of American democracy, as described by Alexis de Tocqueville. Throughout the nineteenth century, while America had maintained the
democracy won by its revolution, France’s own democracy was overturned by monarchs and emperors, such as Napoleon III, whose ambitions saw the New World not as a beacon of liberty but as a territory to be conquered. The French relationship to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century was thus as equally shaped by France’s complicated colonial history as it was by its democratic sisterhood.
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the wars waged across the Atlantic. The French literary legacy of these two revolutionary and abolitionist wars thus presents a fascinating glimpse into the ever-changing tensions between varying expressions of what it meant to be French in the socially and politically unstable nineteenth century.
This dissertation analyzes the ways in which several such texts
concerning the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War served to stake a claim to French identity under the two nineteenth-century Napoleonic Empires. As we will note in the case of the Haitian Revolution, the immediate
representation of the war through Napoleonic propaganda was as a way to hastily establish a unifying version of historical truth through theatrical and often grotesque representations of the people and events associated with the war. In the case of the American Civil War, French representations served as a means to express a new French identity during and after the Second Empire.
Depictions of both wars asked readers the question: in the struggles of two warring factions, what resonates with that which defines French identity? The shifting and redefining nations of both Haiti and the United States thus served as foils against which France could attempt to glean traces of its own collective identity in the destabilizing shifts into and out of the Napoleonic Empires.
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Dubois, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and J. Michael Dash have written, the French Atlantic literary tradition is markedly lacking the written history of the colonized by the colonized themselves, leaving us to pull together scraps of written memory through the voice of the colonizer. In the unique case of the Haitian Revolution, the first successful massive slave revolt and the establishment of the first Black Republic, we find a unique moment in which the French colonizer, the slaveholder, the master, could envision himself a victim, an underdog, and a slave himself.1 While some nineteenth-century canonical authors, such as Hugo
in Bug-Jargal (1830) and Alphonse de Lamartine in Toussaint Louverture (1850), produced later works that humanized and sympathized with the Haitian revolutionaries, earlier and lesser-known authors like French propagandist René Périn, in his 1802 novella, L’incendie du cap, painted a grimly animalistic portrait of the young nation’s revolutionary leaders:
Lorsque de nouveaux troubles appellent la valeur française en d’autres climats, une horde d’Africains farouche, qu’une pitié mal étendue arracha au frein de l’esclavage, une poignée de brigands veut disputer à la France l’empire des Colonies, veut nous ravir cette belle et vaste partie de nos richesses, qui nous a couté deux cent ans de travaux. (Périn xi)
Through Périn’s description of the conflict leading up to the Haitian Revolution, we see a benevolent France, whose only fault is to have allowed French Republicans to act on their pity for slaves. In Périn’s narrative and others of its kind, commissioned and endorsed by Napoleon himself, Haiti was stolen, not liberated, from France.
1 In the following chapters, I propose analyses of several such texts in which
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Sixty years after Haiti declared its independence from France, the Confederate States of America declared its intention to separate from the American Union, as well as its intention to maintain the institution of slavery upon which its society had been founded. The American Civil War thus raised questions about nationhood, slavery, and democracy that largely reprised the long-silenced debates of the Haitian Revolution. In Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: the Promise and Peril of the Haitian Revolution, Matthew J. Clavin beautifully outlines the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the American Civil War, and demonstrates the intersections between these two Atlantic wars of independence and abolition. As Clavin proves, the specter of the Haitian Revolution lingered above the United States throughout much of the nineteenth century, signaling the inevitable war that would end American slavery once and for all.
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Civil War America was a land divided by conflict, and a land equally divided by culture in the French literary imagination. Between a bustling axis of modernity and a nostalgic landscape of sugar plantations past, popular French depictions of Civil War America painted two distinct worlds. About the French view of America at the dawn of the Civil War, Jacques Portes writes that, “to the average French person, the Americans were… the representatives of a society that evoked a certain nostalgia for the French sugar islands” (Portes vii). Indeed, French government and industry saw a commercial interest in the war, as the South was the land of the booming cotton industry, and Union blockades put a dangerous threat on a lucrative Franco-American trade relationship. As
evidenced by the popularity of recounting events and anecdotes in the French press,2 the Civil War was a hotly debated topic of both passive and active French interests. Years after the war, as in the case of the Haitian Revolution, some authors dramatized the observed war in novels and novellas, such as Jules Verne’s Les forceurs du blocus (1871) and Nord contre sud (1887). In retrospect, the popularity of the anti-slavery literature produced by Verne might indicate that France, beyond Napoleon III’s political interests in the failure of the Union, collectively condemned the Confederacy. However, certain
non-canonical3 French literary works inspired by the war, such as Louise de
2 See Reclus, Elisée, and Soizic Alavoine-Muller’s Les Etats-Unis Et La Guerre
De Sécession: Articles Publiés Dans La Revue Des Deux Mondes, a synthesis of articles published from 1861-1865.
3 Here, I am referring to the “official canon” perceived by Alastair Fowler as works
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Bellaigue’s Nos Américains (1883), as well as the striking popularity of texts translated into French with a more tangible political slant, such as Edmund Kirke’s 1862 Among the Pines,4 support, and even romanticize, the plight of the
South. The equal popularity of works that fell in support of either side of the American conflict indicates that French interest in the war went beyond questions of abolition and secession. As we will see in the analysis of texts surrounding both the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War, much of the French writing pertaining to both wars centers more firmly on broader questions of determining national identity in France’s ever-changing nineteenth-century social and political landscape.
The outpouring of French literature, pro-Northern, pro-Southern, and relatively neutral, related to the American Civil War demonstrates strong thematic and stylistic similarities to the French literary response to the Haitian Revolution, similarities that hint at the social and racial complexities faced by a country moving itself from Republic to Empire and back again, especially through the repeated abolition and reestablishment of slavery. While the extent and tenacity of the correlations between these two bodies of text are manifested multifold, the binding discourse between the two bodies of literature is one that reflects historical trauma and the malleability of collective memory in nineteenth-century France. Most of these texts straddle and bend the lines between fiction and history, as invented storylines are often interwoven with true-life events and
4 Translated in 1863 by Franck Bertin as Les noirs et les petits blancs dans les
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historical figures, and accompanied by historical notices in prefaces and footnotes.
France and the Haitian Revolution
In recent years, there has been no shortage of excellent scholarship on the events, implications, and repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in the context of French history, the French Atlantic, and the history of ideas. The social currents pushed into motion by the war that marked not only the first successful slave revolt in history, but also the forcefully effective rejection of the colonial institution by the enslaved themselves, swept across the Atlantic in a world-changing movement. And yet, as works by scholars such as Michel Rolph Trouillot and J. Michael Dash have argued, one of the most remarkable aspects of the legacy left by the Haitian Revolution is how quickly it was forgotten, brushed aside by societies built far too solidly upon foundations of slavery and colonialism to risk questioning their tenets.
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Yale French Studies published a special issue on Haiti, featuring articles from scholars who were or would go on to be the preeminent voices of the newly shaping field. Deborah Jenson, who edited the issue, included a preface that artfully draws the comparison between the events of the French and Haitian Revolutions, and between Napoleon and the Haitian leader, Toussaint Louverture:
The French Revolution’s black twin threatened to destabilize some individual identites as well: Napoleon Bonaparte experienced his first major defeat at the hands of the followers of the ‘black Napoleon,’ the former slave Toussaint Louverture. (Jenson 1-2)
The histories, and leaders, of France and Haiti were developing in tandem across the Atlantic.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the histories of France, Haiti, and the United States were naturally and inextricably intertwined. After France declared its independence from tyranny in 1789, the tides of Haiti’s independence from French control took violent form across the Atlantic in 1791. As France found itself under the First Empire of Napoleon only a few years after founding the First Republic, Toussaint Louverture took the reins not only of the war, but of the nation of Haiti itself. In 2008’s Tree of Liberty: Cultured Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic, Doris L. Garraway places the Haitian Revolution in the context of an “Age of Revolutions”,5 including that of the United States:
The revolution that has historically been silenced in accounts of the ‘Age of Revolutions’ is the one that exposed the ideological limitations of the French and American revolutions, in which vindications of individual
5 As does Sibylle Fischer in her 2004 Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the
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liberties rested on a tacit assumption of the right to human property. (Garraway 2)
In Garraway’s analysis, the Haitian Revolution took part in a broadly
contextualized questioning of these rights and liberties in a context that stretched beyond France and Haiti, and into the Atlantic at large. She sees the case of the Haitian Revolution as particularly monumental in the issues that it raised in determining the rights and liberties of three distinct socioethnic groups on one small island: white colonists, who sought political autonomy from France; freed people of color, who sought the opportunity to claim the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen; and slaves, who sought acknowledgment of the same basic claim to humanity and property as whites and freed people of color. Clearly, while all of these claims have to do in some way or another with France itself, the
implications of each of these movements reverberated strongly in the United States, a nation having recently declared its own colonial autonomy, and a nation also heavily reliant upon the institution of slavery. While example of the Haitian Revolution would hover above the United States for many decades as a
cautionary tale, its memory reverberated throughout France with an overriding sense of melancholy engendered by the fresh memory of colonial failure.
In Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Sibylle Fischer describes the sense of historic melancholy that characterizes the memory of the Revolution:
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and unnaturalness. So it is perhaps not surprising that the historical imaginary that develops in the course of the nineteenth century has a peculiarly warped and melancholic quality. (Fischer 133)
Undoubtedly, as Fischer argues, the melancholic effects of this legacy were felt throughout the Atlantic, as France came to terms with its troubling colonial loss and the United States came to terms with its potential future. Napoleon, in
particular, needed to escape the embarrassment of his first major defeat, a major setback in the building of his Empire, hastily disposing of the Louisiana Territory and moving his interests outside of the Caribbean. However, as Christopher L. Miller argues in “Forget Haiti: Baron Roger and the New Africa,” the Haitian Revolution was not as forgotten as Napoleon may have liked, citing the number of literary representations of the conflict that continued to surface in France throughout the nineteenth century:
The persistence of representations of the Haitian Revolution in French literature and in the nineteenth-century debates over the abolition of slavery, even many years after the revolution, showed that France was having a hard time forgetting its former colony and letting it go. (Miller 39) Indeed, the Haitian Revolution did stake a claim on the French literary
imagination, particularly in the minds of romantics and Republicans. From Claire de Duras’ Ourika to Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal, tales of martyrdom in the name of liberty and equality provided the perfect backdrop or point of reference for
sensational narrative.6
However, there was also a different literature borne out of the Haitian Revolution, literature in the form of pamphlets and propaganda produced by both
6 While Hugo’s work enjoyed rather immediate and visible success, Duras’
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colonists and Napoleon in the effort to control public opinion about the slave revolts, as well as to encourage Napoleon’s 1802 to 1803 attempts to reinvade Haiti and reinstitute the former colony. In Friends and Enemies: The Social Politics of Post/Colonial Literature, Chris Bongie describes this literature as the manifestation of the melancholic sentiment around France’s troubling memories of colonial loss, and as a final attempt to rally France around the idea of itself as a colonial power in the Atlantic. As time wore on, and the probability of a
successful French re-entry into Haiti lessened, the Republicans and romantics were the only writers clinging to the narrative. According to Bongie, the texts produced in favor of a reinvasion of Haiti:
… were essentially melancholic attempts at reincorporating the forever lost imperial object, and once the former colony was officially separated from the body of the French state in 1825, their production rapidly tailed off; Haiti’s degraded status as neo-colonial vassal was hardly enough to compensate for the melancholy-inducing loss of the former ‘perle des Antilles,’ and its memory would be largely marginalized in French consciousness for the next two hundred years. (Bongie 47)
And so the discourse of nostalgia eventually gave way to silence, and to the ‘forgetting’ described by Miller.
While much of the literature produced by Haitian nationals is currently being mined with the mounting interest in minor literatures and postcolonial identity,7 the works of propaganda produced by Napoleon and the colonists have been left largely untouched. Such texts, produced within this brief moment of
7 The concept of “minor literature,” as described by Deleuze and Guattari in
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature as characterized by the deterritorialization of a major language, its political nature, and its collective value, is particularly
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imperial nostalgia, provide a glimpse into an important piece of France’s cultural and literary history. While they likely circulated among the wealthier classes due to issues of literacy and cost, their production and distribution hints at a longing for the past that runs in direct contrast to the massive and collective “forgetting” that has informed much recent Haitian scholarship. About the literature produced by the colonists, and not by Napoleon, Leon-Francois Hoffman writes:
If the reading public was kept (or even made) aware of the Haitian Revolution once the Napoleonic adventure was over, it was for a time through the numerous booklets and pamphlets published by the former plantation owners and their salaried spokesmen. They were hoping to persuade public opinion to pressure the government into mounting
another military expedition with the goal of returning the land and slaves to their ‘rightful owners.’ (Hoffman 340).
And so we see that there was a collective response to the troubling memory of the Haitian Revolution that was not based on the effort to forget, but on a very real effort to remember.
Some Haiti scholars have argued that the Haitian Revolution was such a transformative turning point in history that it was utterly impossible to forget in any historical sense. In The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic, David Geggus compares the effect of the war to that of the Hiroshima bomb, writing that, “its meaning could be rationalized or repressed, but never really forgotten” (Geggus 4). In his analysis of the century following the Haitian
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discourse on slavery in the United States that was produced in Haiti, France, and the United States itself, though not always explicitly.
In scholarship that deals with the later silencing of history around the Haitian Revolution, none is more celebrated or more artfully expressed than that of Trouillot. Silencing the Past: The Power and Production of History has
irrevocably shaped the way in which scholarship deals not only with the question of the ramifications of the Haitian Revolution in the nineteenth century and
beyond, but also the question of the ways in which humanity has used memory and text to cultivate and suppress histories and identities. As Trouillot writes:
If I write a story describing how U.S. troops entering a German prison at the end of World War II massacred five hundred Gypsies; if I claim this story is based on documents recently found in Soviet archives and corroborated by German sources, and if I fabricate such sources and publish my story as such, I have not written fiction. I have produced a fake. (Trouillot 6)
In Trouillot’s analysis, the line between fiction and falsehood lies in the way in which the text is presented. In his example, the claim and fabrication of false facts and sources are what push fiction into the realm of deceit, and the brunt of this transformation thus takes place not in the creation of the text, but in the manner in which it is delivered to its audience. As we will see in the subsequent chapters dealing with the propaganda and censored literature of both the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War, this line is further blurred by a
15 France and the American Civil War
The field of scholarship based around the interconnected histories and cultural relations between France and the United States is not a recently developed one, though its guiding questions and approaches have certainly echoed the scholarly tendencies of their times. Especially in the last thirty years, the question of identity has reigned over most such works. The chapters housed in Michèle R. Morris’ edited volume, Images of America in Revolutionary France explore the ways in which French identity was changed and defined by American democracy during the French Revolution. Likewise, Jacques Portes’ Fascination and Misgivings: The United States in French Opinion, 1870-1914 presents and analyzes the writings of French travelers to the United States from the start of the Third Republic to the beginning of the First World War, whose works indicate that they were traveling more in search of defining French than American identity. Most such studies take care to draw the line between French government opinion and French public opinion of the United States, noting the different political
events on either side of the Atlantic that would have impacted, and often
reversed, these factors. In the length of French-American relations, nowhere is this distinction more complicated than in the case of the nineteenth century, and most particularly in the case of the American Civil War.
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losses in the Americas and was aggravated by America’s successful expansion resulting from such French losses. By the end of Napoleon’s rule, the French presence in the United States, no longer secured by the Louisiana Territory, became one of legacy instead of politics. Ronald Creagh’s Nos cousins
d’Amerique (1988), which traces the arrivals, existences, and disappearances of French culture, people, and communities in America, counts the sale of the Louisiana Territory as the first step toward the end of a solid French presence in the United States. According to Creagh, the American Civil War marked the conclusion of American social and cultural allegiance to France.8 As this presence waned, France and America were in a position to reevaluate their political and social positions in relation to one another. The American Civil War was one of the first major steps in this renegotiation.
In Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France, John J. Miller and Mark Molesky paint a long and complicated history filled with deception and disappointment. Published in 2004, and likely spurred by the American wave of animosity for perceived French treachery following the events of September 11, this book takes the reader through every historical moment in which America could be perceived as betrayed or attacked by France. Miller and Molesky see the Civil War as particularly poignant moment in this history of betrayal, arguing that Napoleon III’s actions during the Civil War were guided by a “naked animus toward the United States” (Miller and Molesky 118). The Emperor, they write, was more interested in halting the advance of American
8 “De la civilisation de leurs pères seuls demeurent des vestiges, au cimetière
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power than advancing his own through the conflict. Miller and Molesky go on to position French actions during the Civil War as a historical moment that is often, like the Haitian Revolution, conveniently forgotten by France:
French leaders are always claiming that their country helped make American independence possible. Yet they never acknowledge France’s role in a brazen effort to dissolve the American Union. Had Napoleon III succeeded in splitting the United States in two and establishing a
monarchy in Mexico, he would have harmed Americans as much as Louis XVI had helped them nearly a century earlier. (Miller and Molesky 133) While Miller and Molesky push the limits of reason by insinuating that France was to blame for the near failure of the American Union, their unrelenting contempt for French conduct during the Civil War demonstrates that the war was and is a moment of significance in the complicated history of French-American relations.
Toward understanding the legacy of this relationship, George McCoy Blackburn’s French Newspaper Opinion of the American Civil War outlines not only the coverage of the Civil War in the French press, but also the body of scholarship concerning France and the Civil War to date. According to Blackburn’s analysis of the history of French-American Civil War studies:
An examination of French reaction or attitudes toward the Civil War
involves two major aspects. One aspect is the desired outcome of the war: some Frenchmen championed the Northern cause while others
championed the Southern cause. A second aspect is the anticipated outcome of the Civil War: a belief that the North would triumph militarily and maintain the American Union or a belief that the South would achieve independence. (Blackburn x)
Indeed, these lines, crossed not only along support for the North and support for the South, but also along the distinction between desire and anticipation, can be traced in most of the early works included in this body of scholarship. For
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American Civil War, the first scholarly book on the topic, establishes that conservative Imperialists who supported Napoleon III also supported the Confederacy, but did so as enemies of the Union instead of as supporters of slavery. Likewise, Donaldson Jordan and Edwin Pratt’s 1931 Europe and the American Civil War presents a France divided into two camps: the conservative and Imperialist supporters of the South and the liberal and Republican supporters of the North. In 1968, Serge Gavronsky’s The French Liberal Opposition and the American Civil War suggested that the liberals who supported the North were doing so more as an affirmation of democracy than one of the American Union, while conservatives who sided with the South were doing so in opposition to the general principle of democracy. In a chapter entitled “France and the Civil War” in Harold Hyman’s Heard Round the World: The Impact Abroad of the Civil War (1969), David H. Pinkey notes that the French people reacted more strongly to the Civil War than did the French government. As Pinkey demonstrates,
Napoleon III, despite an Imperial interest in the dissolution of the Union, launched a largely ambivalent public movement in response to the Civil War due to fear of British and American retribution. It was thus in the realm of the masses that the war of public opinion was to take place in France, though not without the heavy hand of Imperial propagandists and censors.
Edwin de Leon, the Confederacy’s minister to France, led the cause of promoting French support of Southern secession with a minimal amount of Napoleonic intervention. De Leon spent $30,000 on the circulation of
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press leaders with 500,000 bales of cotton in order to further Confederate
interests.9 Of Napoleon III’s reaction to the Confederate push for explicit support of the South, Henry Blumenthal writes:
French public opinion with respect to the American war was thus divided. Napoleon III, who is said to have paid much attention to public sentiment, found himself, therefore, in the dilemma of alienating part of the French or American people, no matter what he did. (Blumenthal 137)
Napoleon III, to whom public opinion was so important, was faced with a difficult decision in reacting to the American Civil War, and the ways in which he handled the conflict continue to be at the center of a debate, particularly concerning the ways in which his actions reflected or conflicted against public opinion.
This tension between the interests of the French Empire and the interests of the French people led to a legacy that largely reads as ambivalent. Philippe Roger’s 2005 The American Enemy devotes a chapter to analyzing the French ambivalence during the American Civil War. According to Roger, the French press was entirely in agreement on three points: the legitimacy of the
Confederacy’s right to secede; the immorality of the institution of slavery in the United States; and that a complete and total victory by either North or South would be impossible (Roger 71). In Roger’s argument, agreement on these three principles remains the cause of much confusion to historians attempting to stake out the clean lines of distinction between the positions of Imperial Confederates and Republican Unionists, as “a majority sympathetic to the South coexisted with a massive condemnation of slavery” (Roger 79). Roger also discusses the tactics used by propagandists to promote French support in light of this strange binary in
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public opinion: “In order to win France’s sympathy, the South had to be portrayed as the victim, yet the Confederacy also had to appear indomitable and durable” (Roger 83). Likewise, propaganda in support of the Union needed to
acknowledge the South’s right to secession, all while condemning its reliance upon the institution of slavery. Such discourse surrounding the rights of slaves and secessionists would permeate the French fascination with the American Civil War, as well as demonstrate the ways in which Imperial censorship further
complicated the French texts and opinions spawned by the conflict.
Publishing Under Two Empires
In his article, “The Censorship Under Napoleon I,” J. Holland Rose argues that the practices of censorship and propaganda under Napoleon in the First Empire, though revolutionary in many ways, were primarily based on tactics used by the Revolutionists of 1789. While Napoleon’s regime did not pioneer the regulation of cultural production, history has certainly credited Napoleon with some of the most powerful censorship tactics in European history. Shutting down the majority of theaters, newspapers, and printing presses in Paris, Napoleon’s regime certainly believed in the potential danger of the printed word and image. Napoleon’s rapid control of the theater and the press, in particular, was
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Empire.10 As Rose writes, any cultural production referring to modern times had the potential to be particularly troubling to Napoleon, and, in controlling the press and other major outlets of cultural production, he favored tales of antiquity as long as they did not include themes that may have been interpreted as “anti-tyrant” (Rose 62). As Robert Holtman demonstrates in Napoleonic Propaganda, the French government under Napoleon devoted a great amount of attention and consideration to cultivating a positive public opinion, and recognized the written word as a very powerful tool well before the revolutions in typography and literacy of the 1830s.
Propaganda, Napoleonic and otherwise, played a significant role in Napoleon’s handling of the Haitian Revolution. Many French colonists and historians blamed the transatlantic spread of humanitarian and democratic propaganda spawned by the Revolution on 1789 for the slave revolts, believing that the principles of liberty had been misdirected and had opened a Pandora’s Box of bedlam in the French Atlantic.11 Likewise, Napoleon’s propagandist
10 “He reduced the Parisian press from 72 newspapers to 4, closed two-thirds of
the city’s printshops, and reduced the number of Parisian theaters from 33 to 8. By 1810-11 he reintroduced of continued virtually all pre-1789 censorship
controls, including licensing of printers, book-shops, and theater, prior censorship of drama and the press, and genre restrictions for theatres. Napoleon personally supervised a rigid theater censorship, for example completely banning all
references to the deposed Bourbons as well as to other threatening topics such as the punishment of tyrants and (when he decided to leave his wife Josephine) divorce.” Robert Justin Goldstein, The Frightful Stage: Political Censorship of the Theater in Nineteenth-Century Europe. p. 87.
11 In David Patrick Geggus’ analysis of Bryan Edwards, Survey of St. Domingo in
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system was cranked to high gear before the Emperor’s final and unsuccessful attempt to reinvade and once again take possession of Haiti.
Napoleonic censorship under the First Empire was thus effective enough to either prevent or destroy the apparition of most republican cultural production under its reign, leaving little of a textual trail about the Haitian Revolution that was not either produced or sanctioned by Napoleon’s regime. Under Napoleon III in the Second Empire, however, cultural and technological shifts made that level of control nearly unattainable, or at least undesirable. While the first Napoleon’s censorship was built on force, Napoleon III’s needed to rely on prevention. As Denis Hollier writes of the Second Empire in A New History of French Literature:
Liberals and monarchists were allowed to express themselves as long as they did not attack Napoleon by name. But the threat of censorship, leading to fines that might put a publication out of business, frequently succeeded in moderating their antagonism. On the other hand, Napoleon believed the republicans could not be reconciled to the regime, and they were more or less systematically silenced. (Hollier 721)
The particular circumstance of republicans, as opposed to liberals and
monarchists, may have also been due to their history of successful propaganda campaigns, as borrowed with favorable results by Napoleon during the First Empire. In fact, much social and political unrest during the Second Empire was often blamed on the wide circulation of printed materials that followed the Revolution of 1848. As Roger Price explains in The French Second Empire: an Anatomy of Political Power, effective control over the press became an
immediate and central concern of the government after Napoleon III’s 1851 coup d’état. As Price cites, the suspension and suppression of newspapers was
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No newspaper should appear without your authorization. You will not tolerate any discussion of the legality of recent events. Neither will you allow articles whose effect is to weaken the authority of the government. (Price 171)
Most of the Republican newspapers that survived the coup, including Le Siècle, did so only because of the force of public opinion, with Napoleon’s regime fearing that the closing of these wildly popular papers would incite mass revolt. These daily papers would thus be driven to self-censorship for fear of the prosecution, hefty fines, and even jail sentences imposed by the Empire in case of any transgression, giving way to an era of politically neutered, though not entirely neutral journalism.
Other printers and booksellers also had to deal with strict controls set forth by the Second Empire, though the execution of these regulations was
complicated by the Empire’s own interest in promoting wealth and growth. In Reading and Riding: Hachette’s Railroad Bookstore in Nineteenth-Century France, Eileen S. DeMarco studies the birth and spread of the Hachette company, long the only option for print purchases at rail stations as they
themselves spread across France. Ultimately, she concludes that, while much of Hachette’s material was self-censored to cater to socially conservative taste at the time, Napoleon III had little interest in restricting the growth of such a
lucrative industry: “For the Second Empire, promoting commercial expansion was more important than enforcing the letter of the law on book trade regulations” (DeMarco 118). With relatively lax enforcements of censorship regulations on the book trade, many republicans favored this medium for the creation and
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as less than favorable towards the Second Empire, however, still needed to take great precaution to avoid punishment.
The tactics used to evade censorship under the Second Empire are, naturally, rather difficult to trace, as are the many means of prohibitive measures put in place by the Emperor’s regime.In the case of the cheaper, more popular presses, even less is known about the extent of censorship under Napoleon III.12 According to Robert Justin Goldtein’s “Fighting French Censorship, 1815-1881,” the most explicit forms of censorship under the Second Empire were focused more on visual than on written expressions of dissent, despite recent advances in national literacy, and perhaps due to the increasing appearance of political
caricatures and the preponderance of easily distributed lithographic prints. While Napoleon III knew that he would never win the support of literate Republicans, he feared the influence that such images might have on the masses.13 As Goldstein
writes:
The French authorities were even more afraid of the potential impact of visual, as contrasted with written expressions of dissent, such as might be offered by caricature and the theater. This was because a large
percentage of the especially-feared ‘dark masses’ were illiterate and thus
12 In “The Failings of Popular News Censorship in Nineteenth-Century France,”
(Book History. Volume 4, (2001) pp. 49-80) Thomas J. Cragin explores the many ways in which the proliferation of print culture in the mid-nineteenth century prevented Napoleon III’s control over what was being published in France during the Second Empire. As he demonstrates, the many established newspapers that had been established during the Republic that preceded his reign were
particularly difficult to monitor.
13 See Goldstein’s The War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in
Nineteenth-Century Europe (Westport: Praeger, 2000), which outlines the
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‘immune’ to the written word, but they were not blind and thus were perceived as highly susceptible to subversive imagery, which was, moreover, viewed as having a far greater visceral impact than was the written word. (Goldstein 785)
While a censorship that focused on the power of images was not new to France under the Second Empire,14 the public’s capacity for evading censorship, due to
the relatively lax enforcement of the popular commercial press, revolutionized the way in which publishers were able to sidestep governmental regulations for a mass audience. As Goldstein argues, the Second Empire’s insistence upon protecting its control by preventing its subjects from exposure to the corrupting influence of images and physical representations gave way to an evasion of censorship that focused, likewise, primarily on images and visual themes. The Image of French Identity
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault describes a fundamental
reconfiguration of the conception of history that took place in France at the end of the eighteenth century. As France attempted to come to terms with the changes brought forth by the Revolution of 1789, modernity hurtled forward, a symptom, precursor to, and result of the upheavals engendered by democracy. The development of information-transmitting technology was moving faster than the rise in literacy among the lower classes, thus privileging the spread of information through other, more visual and less textual means. As literacy rates eventually
14 Goldstein cites the following statement from the Minister of Justice
Jean-Charles Persil on the reimposition of the censorship of drawings and theater in 1835: “Mais lorsque les opinions sont converties en actes, lorsque, par la
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caught up with technology, text itself adopted the themes and conventions of modes of visual transmission. The effects of this relationship between textual and visual cultures in France manifested itself in many lesser-analyzed, popular works of fiction, biography, and travel narrative, such as those analyzed by this dissertation. However, its effects were equally seen in many canonical texts of nineteenth-century French literature, particularly in the realist movement. According to Margaret Cohen, the nineteenth-century birth of the realist movement in French literature coincides with the dawn of modernity. She
describes realism as “a state-of-the-art visual and textual practice” that renewed French interest in its current identity as much as in its own history (Cohen x). In other literary movements, including in the writing of history, the visual aspect of this textual practice was particularly linked to French national identity. As images were reproduced with greater ease through technology, the public developed an appetite for visual representation. As Guy Debord begins his analysis of the modern impulse of transforming lived experience into visual representation in Society of the Spectacle:
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. (Debord 1) According to Debord, the spectacle itself is not merely a collection of images, but the visual enactment of a social relationship, a relationship between people that is expressed through images. The nineteenth-century popularity of moving images, panoramic platforms, and lithographs all indicate a thirst for the
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truth. Indeed, knowledge and experience seemed to become inextricably linked in nineteenth-century France. Just as the prioritization of the visual served as a means to reinforce fact, the transformation of the visual into the spectacle served as a means of reinforcing a collectivity along with fact.
As much as visual culture in nineteenth-century France prioritized the accuracy of historical depictions, as we will see in the following chapter, the phenomenon of the spectacle was equally an opportunity to forget, and even negate, widely-held beliefs. In his analysis of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Jonathan Crary writes that, for Debord, the core of the spectacle is the “annihilation of historical knowledge- in particular the destruction of the recent past” (Crary 106). Instead of historical time, the spectacle sets forth a never-ending present, safe from the dangers of historical reflection. However, Maurice Samuels has demonstrated, nineteenth-century French visual culture was fixated on the past. Whether in an attempt to annihilate a widely held historical belief or to reinforce a certain aspect of collective memory, the obsession with spectacle in nineteenth-century France was based upon a visual categorization of social and historical elements. As we will see in the following chapters, visual modes of transmitting and classifying information were crucial to the portrayal of the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War in nineteenth-century France.
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written and published immediately following the wars themselves, the
concretization of historical events needed to negotiate the transition from the memory of the event itself to the historical representation of the event. In this way, such texts invited even those readers who had experienced the events in the restructuring of individual experience into national legacy, or from memory into history.
Colonial Memory and History
The tension between memory and history has been and continues to be contested by theorists and historians. Pierre Nora, in Les Lieux de Mémoire describes the acceleration of history as a continuous slide of the present into the past in a disconcerting experience of loss and transition. Lieux de mémoire, or places of memory, where memory is crystallized, serve as refuges from this constantly rupturing equilibrium (Nora 235). The tension between memory and history manifests itself singularly through the manner in which both relate to fiction, a lieux de mémoire in and of itself. It is the narrative, whether explicitly fictional or expressly historiographic, that negotiates the line between both. In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur uses historical and fictional narratives to consider history’s questioning of memory, and memory’s questioning of history. In Ricoeur’s work, time and narrative function side by side in a portrayal of a broad temporal experience:
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Ricoeur’s understanding of the function of memory in the narrative, and thus in the transmission of history, relies upon a metaphor of image. To remember is to hold an image of the past, and the transmission of memory takes root specifically in the transmission of images.
While many other theorists have questioned the role of memory in
historical construction,15 the relationship takes a new light in the face of theories dealing with the experience of colonization, decolonization, and the postcolonial world. Edouard Glissant, for instance, writes on the manner in which troubling historical issues, such as slavery, have been formed and reformed in cultural memory. In these contexts, the establishment and transmission of history centers on the formation of national identity, and the functions of collectivity become part of a larger network of discourses surrounding memory. In Mémoires des
Esclavages, Glissant writes of the significant role played by memory in the constructions of nations and national identities in colonial and postcolonial contexts, particularly pertaining to memories that cause national shame instead of national pride. According to Glissant, there are two fundamental kinds of memory in the production of history: the first, “mémoire de la tribu,” is so inherent in the foundation of a social group that it seems to be passed genetically. This memory serves a seminal purpose in establishing or maintaining the existence or
15 See J. Candau’s Anthropologie de la mémoire, an anthropological
consideration of Memory as a construction, equally of things remembered and forgotten, to reflect or respond to the present; and Maurice Halbwachs’ On Collective Memory, which argues that the past is constructed of and through the present, and that all memory, acting in and on the present, is essentially
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status of the group that has created and perpetuated it.16 Tribal memory sustains a group, but is equally dangerous because, with stakes deeply rooted in a
collective identity, it is the fuel of turmoil when any group or individual
transgresses that identity. The second kind of historical memory described by Glissant is the “mémoire collective de la Terre” (collective world memory), a memory that crosses social and national boundaries, created by and belonging to the entire world.17 The understanding of history in Glissant’s argument is marked by these “histoires cachées” (hidden histories), the unfurling of tribal memories without a broad understanding of their collective consequences, which, as
Glissant writes, “se disent sans se dire tout en se disant” (tell themselves without telling themselves, all while telling themselves). Often, the lack of historical
perspective is ignored simply because it is uncomfortable to recognize the cost of memory, or to recognize that the memory upon which an entire nation or school of belief may have been founded was entirely misguided. In the case of the Haitian Revolution, the Napoleonic propaganda produced in the wake of the war
16 Tribal memory can thus serve as the cornerstone of a collective experience,
and as an integral component in the establishment of communities. According to Glissant, these memories are “toutes fondées sur une expérience commune d’un passé reconnu comme tel et qui déclenchera chez les individus des réactions différentes…sur un fond généralement agréé par tous. Les fantasmes nourris par cette mémoire s’effacent peu à peu, mais sont remplacés par d’autres” (Glissant 164). The original experience around which the memory was formed becomes less important as it is replaced by the memory of the collectivity that formed around it.
17 To Glissant, these memories can be formed as the collective experience of
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perfectly demonstrates the negation of historical perspective in favor of avoiding the memory of Napoleon’s misguided unsuccessful efforts to reinstate slavery in the colonies.
In Les abus de la mémoire, Tzvetan Todorov writes of the creation of memory as a process of selection, in which elements are either preserved or discarded by the rememberer, rather than as a process of production. Memory, he writes, is at the base of all social links, and thus has the capacity to either create or destroy social foundations; therefore, in order to understand the ways in which memory is serving a personal or communal purpose, one must examine the criteria with which the rememberer is undergoing the process of selection. Memory, he writes, is created in two primary forms that function in vastly different ways: “literal memory,” which is regarded as existing solely in the past and is thus inapplicable to any event outside of itself, and “exemplary memory,” which is analogous in nature, and can be used to provide an affirmative or cautionary lesson in the context of a more current situation.18 To Todorov, exemplary
memory is at the root of justice, providing relativity to historical memories, but it is just as subject to misuse as its literal counterpart. As Todorov writes, there are three main abuses of memory, all of which are found in literature designed to
18 In this, Todorov points out that the individual human experience of memory is
not at all a storage of events, but is constantly selective and exclusive : “La restitution intégrale du passé est une chose bien sûr impossible…et, par ailleurs, effrayante ; la mémoire, elle, est forcément une sélection : certains traits de l’événement seront conservés, d’autres seront immédiatement ou
progressivement écartés, et donc oubliés. C’est bien pourquoi il est profondément déroutant de voir appelée mémoire la capacité qu’ont les
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propagate ideas in a social or political context: (1) the use of memory to establish a comfortable, yet hasty, collectivity; (2) the use of memory as a self-gratifying escape from modernity by pitying its victims; and (3) the use of memory as a means of establishing social currency through the status of having been a victim, to gain the rights of complaint, self-pity, retribution, or vengeance, which are, often, more socially valuable than restitution. When the abuses of memory, as described by Todorov, enter into a force as powerful and inherent as tribal
memory, as described by Glissant, the results can redefine histories and reshape nations, as we will see in the tactics of propaganda and evasions of censorship in French texts on the topic of the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War.
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hybrid testimony, a tribal memory document that recalls the witnessing, with an unmistakable desire to reinforce certain aspects, whether actually present or entirely imagined, therein. In this way, we can consider the infiltrations of the abuses of memory, as outlined by Todorov, into the establishment of tribal memory as indicative of such a historical reinforcement of collective memory. These infiltrations are particularly fascinating to consider in the case of the nineteenth-century French works about the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War, which were subjected not only to the distance between author and reader, but to the intervention of political influences and regulations.
Not entirely historical fiction, as they aren’t presented as entirely fictional, these kinds of identity-supporting texts could be considered “fictional history,” to borrow a term from Hayden White.19 Exemplary by nature, it is through these texts that we can examine the criteria, as described by Todorov, that were selected either by author or by government during the attempted transition from testimony to tribal memory. It is through metaphorical images, physical
appearances, and the eyewitness that these works navigate the shift from travel narratives and historiography to works of fiction during the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War.
19 In Metahistory, White writes that anyone engaged in the writing of any kind of
history “must choose the elements of the story he would tell. He makes his story by including some events and excluding others, by stressing some and
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Through the varying and often hybrid genres of historical fiction,
biography, and travel narrative, these works demonstrate the establishment of French identity in the unsteady transitions between Republics and Empires. Works of popular fiction presented a succession of scenes depicting well-known events from the wars to create a collective experience. Biography, on the other hand, relied upon physiognomic descriptions of major wartime figures to unveil essential truths about the nationhood in question. Travel narrative, an ever-evolving genre, privileged the position of the eyewitness in determining the complicated social and national American identities that were in flux.
The following chapter, “Fiction and History,” will examine Gustave de Beaumont’s 1835 Marie, ou l’esclavage aux Etats-Unis and Louise de Bellaigue’s 1881 Nos Americains, highlighting the intersections between fiction and history that pervade both. To explain the popularity of these works, we will also consider Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique, and the popularity of Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in France, exploring upon the many ways in which these seminal works shaped the relationship between France and America in the nineteenth century. We will examine the evolution of these themes from similar such texts about the Haitian Revolution, particularly René Périn’s L’incendie du cap, an 1802 novella that demonstrates in equal measure the techniques of historical fiction later employed by Beaumont and Bellaigue. Marie, ou l’esclavage, Nos Américains, and L’Incendie du Cap all propose to leap
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“them.” As we will see, the “us” and “them” depicted in these works both separate France from America and France from its own history, distinctions that become almost seamless in the literature surrounding the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War. Eager to depict American slavery as an institution that clings hopelessly to the past, Beaumont and Bellaigue succeed in further distancing themselves, and their readers, from the Haitian Revolution, and thus from their own familiarity with colonial loss.
Chapter 3, “Biographies of Louverture and Lincoln,” will explore the role of physical appearances in nineteenth-century biographical depictions of Toussaint Louverture and Abraham Lincoln. To this end, we will analyze two 1802
propagandist biographies of Toussaint Louverture : Louis Dubroca’s Vie de Toussaint Louverture and Cousin d’Avallon’s Histoire de Toussaint-Louverture; along with three French biographies of Abraham Lincoln : Félix Bungener’s Lincoln: sa vie, son œuvre, sa mort, Achille Arnaud’s Abraham Lincoln: sa
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Despite the differences in the political circumstances and opinions of their authors, the biographies of these prominent wartime figures highlight the
historiographic tendency to align the struggles of a nation with the struggles of an individual, placing both Louverture and Lincoln, in turn, as representatives not only of people, but of nations. Futhermore, these texts emphasize the corporality of the two men, inviting their readers to witness both conflicts, the Haitian
Revolution and the American Civil War, as living and breathing bodies in conflict. The lines between biography and portraiture become nebulous in these
biographers’ portrayals of their subjects, encouraging a clear visualization of Louverture and Lincoln that rivals, and is in some cases accompanied by, printed images included in the text.
Chapter 4, “Eyewitness Travel Narratives,” closes the analysis with a consideration of the creation and reception of the evolving Civil War-era travel narratives of musicians Oscar Comettant and Henri Herz. Both authors,
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one way or another with Comettant’s relatively brief moment of witnessing, a three-year journey in the United States that spawned four texts stretching beyond ten years after his return to France. His friend, Henri Herz, published his own account of American travels in 1866’s Mes voyages en Amérique, and relies not only upon his own visual proximity to Civil War action, but to Comettant’s visual proximity as well, citing his friend’s works throughout his own.
CHAPTER 2 FICTION AND HISTORY
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conceptualizing history as spectacle in nineteenth-century France are particularly pertinent in a consideration of much of the nineteenth-century French popular fiction produced in response to the Haitian Revolution and to the American Civil War.
In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin describes the nineteenth-century creation of what he calls “panoramic literature” as consisting of individual
sketches, or vignettes, which, like the panorama, correspond to a “plastically arranged foreground” (Benjamin 6). In this way, panoramic literature proposes a series of interrelated but independent scenes to be contemplated through
primarily visual terms by its readers, who are in this sense transformed into viewers. While Benjamin’s description of panoramic literature focuses principally on textual works that incorporate literal images, the visual and piece-meal style of the genre permeated the marketplace of popular nineteenth-century French literature in general. According to Alexander Zevin in “Panoramic Literature in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Robert Macaire as a Type of Everyday,” panoramic literature grew in popularity because it was both a readable text and a
consumable product, appealing to the nineteenth-century French hunger for information, novelty, and, of course, images.
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panoramic platform, proposing a still-life, metaphorically visual representation, particularly of historical events. Although understood to be falsifications, each of these works presents itself with a painstaking concern for authenticity, so that a collective suspension of disbelief affords the experience of temporary
reinstatement of memory in the establishment or reinforcement of a collective national or cultural identity. The visual metaphors of spectacle are present in the prefaces and historical notices that surround these works of fictional history, boasting the most accurate depiction by any means necessary. The same elements of phantasmagoric spectacle can also be traced through the very
narratives of the works produced in the aftermath of the two wars, from an almost uniform concern expressed in the preface as to the role of the eyewitness in the creation of the text, to the metaphors and scenes that construct the narrative itself. In the case of these works, the urgency for an actuality of history is joined by the urgency for geographical dislocation. The ability of such works to “turn readers into viewers” (Samuels 167), especially in light of their popular
dissemination, demonstrates the scale of the desired effect of ritualized unity produced by spectacularly visual texts.
Beaumont’s America
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système pénitentiaire aux Etats-Unis et de son application en France in two volumes. Two years later, in 1835, each man published his own work on America, both through the Librairie de Gosselin in Paris: Tocqueville, the first volume of the definitive treatise on the state of American democracy, De la
Démocratie en Amérique ; and Beaumont, a work of popular fiction proclaimed to be rooted firmly in fact, Marie, ou l’esclavage aux Etats-Unis. Beaumont’s novel Marie was, by all measures, a success, but was ultimately eclipsed by the success of De la Démocratie en Amérique. Though Beaumont’s work enjoyed five subsequent editions over the next seven years, Tocqueville had earned himself a place as the French authority on the study of America.20
The question of reception becomes extremely important in interpreting the noteworthy differences between Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Démocratie en Amérique and Gustave de Beaumont’s Marie, ou l’esclavage aux Etats-Unis, as Beaumont mentions Tocqueville’s nonfictional work in relation to his own fiction, explaining the divergences between the works’ creations and anticipated
receptions. As Beaumont writes:
M. de Tocqueville et moi publions en même temps chacun un livre sur des sujets aussi distincts l’un de l’autre que le gouvernement d’un peuple peut être séparé de ses mœurs. Celui qui lira ces deux ouvrages recevra peut-être sur l’Amérique des impressions
différentes, et pourra penser que nous n’avons pas jugé de même
20 For a fascinating analysis of the life intersections of Beaumont and
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le pays que nous avons parcouru ensemble. Telle n’est point la cause de la dissidence apparente qui serait remarquée. La raison véritable est celle-ci : M. de Tocqueville a décrit les institutions ; j’ai taché, moi, d’esquisser les mœurs. (Beaumont 7)
As Tocqueville proposes to present the institutions through nonfiction, Beaumont aims to depict the social mores of the new nation across the Atlantic through fiction, using the verb “décrire” to name Tocqueville’s task, while he envisions himself as more of an artist, aiming to “esquisser”21 the object of his study.
Having traveled the United States together, it is clear that, as proper “witnesses,” they had similar American experiences. The differing structures and receptions of their exceedingly disparate works, resulting from the same journey, highlight the popularity of the recounting of American warfare. Stories of
inequality in America were popular across many different literary modes of transmission, and an equally wide breadth of audiences. Though at times anecdotal, Tocqueville’s De la Démocratie en Amérique would have read been much less appealing to the average consumer of the roman feuilleton than Beaumont’s sensational and melodramatic Marie, ou l’esclavage. Beaumont himself seems to struggle with the pitfalls of his self-imposed generic
constrictions, distinguishing at the outset between “le public sérieux,” who will be turned off by the melodrama of his piece, and the “lecteur frivole,” who will reject its serious subject matter (Beaumont 5). Despite this declaration that his text will
21 Émile Littré’s nineteenth-century Dictionnaire de la langue française defines
“esquisser” as having two meanings. The first, “Faire une esquisse. Esquisser une figure, un tableau.” The second, “Décrire sommairement. Esquisser
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have no truly appreciative audience, Beaumont forges ahead, writing that his observations of these social mores will be applied to an ambiguous “utilité” (Beaumont 4).
In the words of Beaumont, the experience of writing this text, and the manner in which it is meant to be received, are explicitly transformative. Beaumont describes a temporary self-alteration, the displacement of his own identity and geography, for the sake of his work’s “utilité.” He writes that his technique in voicing the opinions of many of the more offensive characters was “entrant dans les préjugés de mon voisin” (Beaumont 7). Even his contract of fiction includes an advance apology: “les opinions qui sont exprimées par les personnages mis en scène ne sont pas toujours celles de l’auteur” (Beaumont 8). The notion of a mise-en-scène, implying a staging of the characters and their opinions, places Beaumont at the head of his creation as an artist or dramatist. The idea of Beaumont as the creator of a spectacle, placing characters in the positions from which they will provide the most faithful representations of their real-life objects of imitation, further reinforces the theatricality and the spectacular quality of his work’s presentation.
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to enter the prejudices of his neighbor in taking the voices of different characters, Beaumont places himself at the heart of his own narrative, stepping outside of the actions of his fictional characters to provide a personal anecdote, explicitly with the goal of guaranteeing the authenticity of one of the major plotlines of his work:
Pour donner au lecteur une idée de la barrière placée entre les deux races, je crois devoir citer un fait dont j’ai été témoin… La première fois que j’entrai dans un théâtre aux Etats-Unis, je fus surpris du soin avec lequel les spectateurs de couleur blanche étaient distingués du public à figure noire… Cependant mes yeux étant portés sur la galerie des mulâtres, j’y aperçus une jeune femme d’une éclatante beauté, et dont le teint, d’une parfaite blancheur, annonçait le plus pur sang d’Europe. Entrant dans les préjugés de mon voisin, je lui demandai comment une femme d’origine anglaise était assez dénuée de pudeur pour se mêler à des Africaines.
- Cette femme, me répondit-il, est de couleur.
- Comment ! de couleur ? Elle est plus blanche qu’un lis !
- Elle est de couleur, reprit-il froidement ; la tradition du pays établit son origine, et tout le monde sait qu’elle compte un mulâtre parmi ses aïeux. (Beaumont vi-viii)
Beaumont’s description of this personal anecdote emphasizes his proximity to the events of his narrative. Highlighting his own role as “témoin” in order to legitimize the fictional narrative of his novel, Beaumont makes a concession to the privilege of the actual eyewitness over the fictional character. The fact that this anecdote takes place in a theater, a place so closely associated with seeing and being seen, with the narrator’s gaze falling down upon the gallery to
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difference between the race and color of the women in question.22 Beaumont, proclaiming surprise at the disconnection between the woman’s physical appearance and her racial identification, indicates that the injustice of this particular situation lies in the random determination of race in America rather than in unequal treatment between the races. Beaumont suggests that racial determination is arbitrary if it is not plainly visible, and that the way in which America defines race is thus unjust.
In the second edition of Marie, Beaumont even includes a lengthy
footnote, addressing the necessity for this guarantor and emphasizing the degree of separation between France and this “odieux préjugé” (vi). In proclaimed
surprise of the fact that one woman, whom Beaumont deems to be the color of a “mulatre,” is permitted to sit in the “galérie des blancs,” Beaumont recalls an earlier incident involving a Frenchman in a New York theater:
Au mois de janvier 1832, un Français, créole de Saint-Domingue, dont le teint est un peu rembruni, se trouvant à New York, alla au théâtre où il se plaça parmi les blancs. Le public américain, l’ayant pris pour un homme de couleur, lui intima l’ordre de se retirer, et, sur son refus, l’expulsa de la salle avec violence. (Beaumont ix)
Beaumont’s evocation of a “créole de Saint-Domingue” in 1831, mere years after Charles X finally acknowledged the sovereignty of the Black Republic for the sum of a hefty indemnity, cannot help but call to mind the rampant discourse
22 In Chapter 4, “Eyewitness Travel Narratives,” I will further analyze the
